The Voice of the Maimed

A look into the life and work of

Carson McCullers

by Brian Greene

Carson McCullers didn't die last week. Houghton Mifflin didn't just re-issue a box set of all her best work, with a few previously unreleased b-sides thrown in. And it's not the anniversary of the official release of any of her books.

In other words, I can't offer any real viable justification for doing a feature article now on an author who has been dead for twenty-four years.

Except that I've been going back and reading her books (again), scouring video store shelves for films based on her stories, reading a 600-plus page biography on her amazing life, and coming to the conclusion that her writing was so brilliant, her lifestyle so fascinating, that I was going to tell you, Catharsis reader, all about her, even if she's not coming to a concert hall close to your home this weekend.

When Carson McCullers was twenty-three years old, she wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a novel indicative of far more insight into the human condition than a green young lady from a small town in Georgia should have had. A sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes grotesque and all the time compelling tale of a deaf mute who moves to a small southern town and becomes a magnet that all of the town's loneliest, most alienated residents are drawn to, this book made Carson an instant success, prompting she and her husband Reeves to make the somewhat predictable move from their Fayetteville, North Carolina home to the Big Apple.

Before the move, though, while she was still waiting to hear from the publishers about her first effort, Carson penned a short novel she originally called Army Post in two months. Not thinking much of the story at the time, the author stuffed it away in a drawer and forgot about it.

And it wasn't until she had became a sure bet for the best seller lists, and her publishers begged her for any manuscript that Army Post became Reflections in a Golden Eye, a book which proved her to be more than a flash in the literary pan.

A sordid, scandalous tale about a bizarre group of people living on an army base, a latent homosexual major, his ball-busting, lustful wife, the officer next door she was having an affair with (and who her husband was equally taken by), the officer's neurotic wife, and a voyeuristic private who splits his time peeking in everyone's windows and riding horseback naked in the woods, was so risque that the United States Army took it as a personal insult, and tried in vain to ban it from America's bookstores.

This story, admittedly highly oblique and ambiguous (leading many readers to say Whaaaaat??? after closing the last page), was to be, like many of Carson's later works, a premonitory look into her own future life.

For, shortly after their move to New York, both Carson and Reeves' sexual inclinations were to become ambiguous (hers in a much more rapid and openly expressed fashion). Carson almost immediately fell in love with a European writer and femme fatale she met in one of the many artistic circles she would become a member of.

And, as she was the type who, throughout her troubled life, would form dependent, hopeless attachments to those she admired, McCullers was thrown for the first of many psychical setbacks when her love was not reciprocated.

But her chronic emotional problems were just the beginning of the manifold maladies Carson would be plagued by throughout her adult life. Besides becoming a hardcore alcoholic and habitual chain-smoker, she suffered three strokes in her time, leaving the majority of the left side of her body partially paralyzed for the better part of her adult years.

Carson McCullers was a fighter, though, and even in the face of tragedy, made even worse by the marital strains caused by Reeves' (perhaps justified) feelings of having been abandoned by his wife as she became a darling of the literary circles, she was writing what was perhaps the greatest of all her works, a novella called The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.

Reeves had literary ambitions of his own, and shortly before the couple were married, had resigned from the army so that he could write. Once married, the two made a pact that one would work one year as the other wrote, then they would take turns the next year.

Well, Carson had the first year, wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and once it had been recognized as a great novel, it was never questioned from there that she would always write, and he could do as he pleased. A flamboyant bisexual, Carson would leave poor Reeves alone at home while she continued to work earnestly and enjoy her newfound celebrity.

Reeves ended up with a drinking problem far worse than even his wife's, forging her royalty checks while she was away working at an artist's colony, and using money that belonged to her to buy booze for himself and the women he picked up.

In the midst of this, Carson's new book was released. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is arguably one of the very finest pieces of American literature. Again, the weird and grotesque are examined by an author ever fascinated by people with defects, both physical and psychological.

Here, they take the form of a twisted love triangle formed by a hunchback midget, an ex-convict, and a big woman who could whip the tail of any man in the county. The woman, Miss Amelia, is a shrewd, pragmatic business woman with crossed eyes and coarse skin whose usually unsympathetic heart is melted by the hunchback, Cousin Lymon, who appears in town at the beginning of the story, claiming obscure family lineage and asking her, tears in his eyes, for charity.

The townsfolk are shocked when this hard-hearted opportunist not only opens her house to the deformed stranger, but falls in love with him and allows him to talk her into turning the downstairs part of her house into a cafe with music, dinner specials and homemade liquor served by the glass. The changes in Miss Amelia's personality and the livening up of the previously comatose town by the enchanting cafe come to an abrupt halt when her troublemaking ex-husband arrives back in town. The struggle created by the fact that the dwarf falls in love with the criminal, breaking Miss Amelia's heart, leads up to a sensational, painful and surprising ending.

This story, like Reflection's, was to prove to be a peek into the future of Carson's personal life, as shortly after it's publication she and Reeves wound up falling for the same man, a composer Carson met in one of her artistic circles. The true story of this triangle turned out to be as painful and nerve-racking as the one depicted in the story, all three of it's players coming away with permanent bruises to the heart before it was all over with.

The next book was to be McCullers' most difficult, but most rewarding piece of work. The Member of the Wedding was a story of a young girl entering the confusing world of adolescence, who, in her desperate attempt to be a part of something, falls in love with the upcoming wedding of her brother and his wife to be. The story took Carson more than five years and much agony to finally finish.

During the almost interminable attempt to write this most personal of all her efforts, Carson was to endure many setbacks in her professional and personal life. She again fell in love with, and was hurt by, a woman who did not return her affections.

This time it was fellow writer Katherine Anne Porter, who was residing in the same artist's colony with Carson as she was putting The Member of the Wedding together. McCullers chased Miss Porter around, despite the fact that Porter considered her a dangerous, selfish, overgrown child (an opinion many people who knew her would reach), and thwarted her admirer's every effort to express her feelings.

(Perhaps the most heartbreaking scene in Carson's personal life, one that surpassed even the most tragic scenes of her often morbid writing, was Carson camping outside of Porter's room, begging the latter to let her come in and tell her how much she loved her. Porter had tried her best to ignore Carson, and when they were called to dinner one night after Carson had spent the entire morning and afternoon laying across the the threshold of Porter's doorway, begging to be let in, Miss Porter casually opened the door, stepped over Carson and continued on to the dinner table.)

In spite of this wound, yet another stroke, more trouble with Reeves, increasing alcoholism and negative opinions from fellow artists to the drafts of her manuscript, Carson finally finished The Member of the Wedding.

It was given mixed reviews, called weak by some and by others her masterpiece. In the end the novel became a huge success, it's admirers far outnumbering it's critics. With the help of her close friend Tennessee Williams, Carson eventually converted the story into dramatic form, prompting what would eventually become a phenomenal theatrical success, both domestically and abroad.

From there, the despair in Carson's life outweighed the triumph by greater and greater degrees, right up to her death at age 50.

Professionally, her work suffered. Her final two projects, a play called The Square Root of Wonderful and a last novel entitled Clock Without Hands, were horrendously weak when put up next to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter or The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.

She suffered another stroke which, coupled by her poor self-care, left her in such a state that, once a comely, if somewhat awkward-looking woman (like her character Miss Amelia, Carson stood a gawky six feet in height; she dressed in mostly men's clothing, and rarely combed her hair) looked like, by age forty, a worn out, haggard, wounded animal. In her last years she lived through the suicide of Reeves, who for a time had seemed to be pulling himself together, prompting a remarriage (Carson had divorced him after finding out about the forged checks), and the death of both her parents.

All was not tragic, though, because even as the quality of her writing and health deteriorated, her personal relationships became more fulfilling. A doctor named Mary Mercer became not only Carson's personal, highly attentive physician but a close friend. Tennessee Williams also stayed nearby.

Ironically, around the time Carson died in 1967, a new generation of people were just learning to appreciate her work. The author had demonstrated her decidedly leftist sentiments in 1940 with a Marxist negro doctor and a battler for the rights of the common man characterized in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and she even made a major civil rights statement by denying her hometown public library's request for an autographed copy of that same book, because they didn't allow black people to patronize their shelves.

Many people who came into contact with Carson McCullers thought her to be a dangerous person to become involved with, citing her childlike need for constant attention and a propensity for developing all-consuming attachments to those she became fond of. And it's difficult to argue with this theory, because all those accusations were obviously correct.

But then one could just as well turn it around and say that the intensity of her feelings, her insatiable need to be a desired part of other's people's lives, (akin to Frankie Addams' yearnings in The Member of the Wedding) were characteristics that came from the soul of a woman who was made in such a way that her heart was unprotected, wide open, devoid of the ease and defenses that many others are granted. It took a brave, big-hearted person to be her friend.

In any case, the legacy she's left to the literary world, a collection of stories that speaks for the physically and psychologically deformed, the unprotected persons in an often indifferent world, is rich enough to earn her a permanent reputation as a great artist.